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Welcoming Winter with Python – PyKids and PyLadies
Winter Break for kids
These celebrations are helping much to come out of the winter worries.
Winter is scary word, but people have to go through it, as life has to go on. As we can not travel much and there are no outdoor events/games, we have to be at home, all the days, weeks and months. Organizing indoor events are costly.
To spend the winter actively, many celebrations days are occurring. Halloween, Christmas, Boxing day, New year, Valentine day and more are there, to make the winter active.
Keeping the kids at home for 17 days winter break is tough. We have to engage them whole day. In our apartment, we are conducting many kids events like weekly chess hour, dance hours, board games day, movie time, sleep over nights etc.
Computer Literacy is good here. Kids are learning to use computer at school, from Grade 3 itself. They play many educational games at school. Homework are done with google slides and google docs, from grade 5. Scratch programming also trained here at grade 5. So, they know very well to use computer, read text online, search the internet and gather some info etc.
PyKids
As our house is empty mostly, ( thanks to Nithya, for the minimalistic life style ), our hall helped for gathering and teaching.
By keeping the hall empty, we are using the place as Daily Zumba dance hall, mini party hall, DJ hall, kids play area and now as a learning place.
Teaching Python for kids is not easy. The kids are not ready to listen to any long talks. They can not even listen to my regular “python introduction” slides. So, jumped into hands-on on the day one itself.
My mentor, Asokan Pichai explained how we have to goto hands-on on any python training, few months ago. Experienced the benefits of it this time.
Even-though, I am using Python for 10+ years, teaching it to kids was really tough. I had to read few books and read on more basics, so that I can explain the building blocks of python with more relevant examples for kids.
The kids are good at asking questions. They share feedback with their eyes itself. It is a huge different on teaching to adults. Most of the adults don’t ask questions. They hesitate to say they don’t understand something. But, kids are brave enough to ask questions and express the feedback immediately.
With a training on 4-6 pm everyday, for around 10 days, we can cover so little of python only.
We practiced the code here – https://github.com/tshrinivasan/python-for-kids We used https://www.online-python.com/ as IDE, as the kids have laptops and tablets with different OS. Will install Python on their laptops on next events so that they can explore more python libraries.
On the final day, my friend Jay Varadharajan, gave a Pizza party for all kids, along with a participation certificate.
Thanks for all the questions kids. Along with you, I learnt a lot. Thanks for all the parents for the great support.
PyLadies
Nithya took the day with all hands-on. She covered the variables, getting input, if/else, for/while loop, string/list operations. The participants were happy to dive into programming so quickly.
“A byte of Python” is a super easy book to learn python. Read it here for free. https://python.swaroopch.com/
Gave this link as asked to read/practice regularly. Hope they are following the book.
Hall for PyLadies meetup
Home as Learning Space
